At eight on Saturday morning, my turn on the family computer began. We were six at home, two parents and four kids, sharing one machine. The schedule was there so everyone could get a turn. On weekdays, my time was from four to five. On weekends, I had the computer from eight to ten. I woke up early, plugged in the router, and used those two hours to play games or explore browsers and software.
Around 2001 or 2002, while we were still in Colombia, my parents bought our first home computer. It was a white machine running Windows 98. My older brothers played Age of Empires, and I played too. My mother kept buying learning CDs for us, especially English material. We did not learn much English from them, but we also had Encarta, where I explored castles and history. Looking back, I was not following a career plan. This was simply how I spent time on the machine we had. Around 2005 or 2006, I started dreaming about having a computer of my own.
We moved to Sherbrooke in 2007 and got home internet for the first time. Before that, I knew the internet through cafés. At home, I became the person who installed new software and navigated browsers on the family computer. Customizing profile pages also became my first accidental contact with HTML and CSS. The router slot belonged to that new period: internet was finally inside the house, but access to the one screen still had to be shared.
In 2009, when I was around twelve, I used Ubuntu 9.04. I still have the orange CD. Ubuntu was my first real exposure to the command line. I became comfortable with sudo, installed software and graphics drivers, and created directories from the terminal. For the first time, I was doing those tasks by typing commands.
That same year, I built my first website with PaginaWebGratis, a free site builder. I called it Mangaka Latino. It was an anime fan site built with HTML, some CSS, and linked images. It also used unauthorized streaming links for anime. Alongside those pages, I added Latino TV and Colombian radio while I was living in Sherbrooke.
I maintained it from 2009 to 2011. As of July 2026, the site was still online. Looking back, what stands out is the combination on that page: anime I followed, television in Spanish, and radio from Colombia, put together with the limited tools I understood at the time. I did not know much about building software, but I had made a place on the internet and kept returning to maintain it for about two years.
Looking at that combination now, I can see the move between countries in the page itself. The site was built in Quebec, but some of what I put on it came from Colombia. I can see it now in what survived.
In summer 2011, I earned $600 at my first job and used the money to buy my first computer, a Sony VAIO. It was the first machine I had funded myself. The computer I had wanted around 2005 or 2006 was finally mine. From 2011 to 2014, the computer was mostly for entertainment, with some light tinkering. I then completed a diploma in accounting and management. My heart still belonged to computers, but the route back was not immediate.
After the diploma, I built a Shopify store from start to finish. Building it showed me there was more behind a page than the parts I could see and customize. I noticed that gap, but it did not immediately change my direction. The real turn came with a different project, one that never became a working product.
A friend suggested a website that would compare grocery prices. I tried to build it, but nothing functional shipped. I had made an anime site and assembled a Shopify store, yet I could not turn this idea into a working application. That failure made the limit of my knowledge concrete. It pushed me toward computer science in 2019.
This was different from customizing a template or assembling a storefront. The idea needed a working system behind the page, and I could not make one.
I finished the computer science program in December 2022. Today I work as a SQL developer and build personal projects. There were years of entertainment, an accounting diploma, a store, and an app attempt that went nowhere. Studying computer science was a later decision I made after finding something useful that I could not build.
The orange Ubuntu 9.04 CD is from 2009, and I still have it upstairs. Looking back, computers often gave me fast feedback: change something, see what happened, and try again. Other systems did not reveal themselves that quickly. Some took years before I could see their structure.
This is chapter 1 of a six-chapter epic. Chapters 1–3: who I am. Chapters 4–6: what I build. Next: How I learn: orbiting a system until it clicks.
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